There are other complete worlds that our assemblage points can assemble. The old seers counted seven such worlds, one for each band of awareness. I’ll add that two of those worlds, besides the world of everyday life, are easy to assemble; the other five are something else.
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A shift of the assemblage point to the area below its customary position allows the seer a detailed and narrow view of the world we know. So detailed is that view that it seems to be an entirely different world. It is a mesmerizing view that has a tremendous appeal, especially for those seers who have an adventurous but somehow indolent and lazy spirit.
The change of perspective is very pleasant. Minimal effort is required, and the results are staggering. If a seer is driven by quick gain, there is no better maneuver than the shift below. The only problem is that in those positions of the assemblage point, seers are plagued by death, which happens even more brutally and more quickly than in man’s position.
My teacher thought it was a great place for cavorting, but that’s all. A true change of worlds happens only when the assemblage point moves into man’s band, deep enough to reach a crucial threshold, at which stage the assemblage point can use another of the great bands.
How? It’s a matter of energy. The force of alignment hooks another band, provided that the seer has enough energy. Our normal energy allows our assemblage points to use the force of alignment of one great band of emanations. And we perceive the world we know. But if we have a surplus of energy, we can use the force of alignment of other great bands, and consequently we perceive other worlds.
This may seem like an oddity to you, but trees, for instance, are closer to man than ants. I’ve told you that trees and man can develop a great relationship; that’s so because they share emanations.
The cocoon of a giant tree is not much larger than the tree itself. The interesting part is that some tiny plants have a cocoon almost as big as a man’s body and three times its width. Those are power plants. They share the largest amount of emanations with man, not the emanations of awareness, but other emanations in general.
Another thing unique about plants is that their luminosities have different casts. They are pinkish in general, because their awareness is pink. Poisonous plants are a pale yellow pink and medicinal plants are a bright violet pink. The only ones that are white pink are power plants; some are murky white, others are brilliant white.
But the real difference between plants and other organic beings is the location of their assemblage points. Plants have it on the lower part of their cocoon, while other organic beings have it on the upper part of their cocoon.
With the inorganic beings, some have it on the lower part of their containers. Those are thoroughly alien to man, but akin to plants. Others have it anywhere on the upper part of their containers. Those are close to man and other organic creatures.
The old seers were convinced that plants have the most intense communication with inorganic beings. They believed that the lower the assemblage point, the easier for plants to break the barrier of perception; very large trees and very small plants have their assemblage points extremely low in their cocoon. Because of this, a great number of the old seers’ sorcery techniques were means to harness the awareness of trees and small plants in order to use them as guides to descend to what they called the deepest levels of the dark regions.
You understand, of course, that when they thought they were descending to the depths, they were, in fact, pushing their assemblage points to assemble other perceivable worlds with those seven great bands. They taxed their awareness to the limit and assembled worlds with five great bands that are accessible to seers only if they undergo a dangerous transformation. In their aberration they believed it was worth their while to break all the barriers of perception, even if they had to become trees to do that.
It is very easy in the path of knowledge to get lost in intricacies and morbidity. Seers are up against great enemies that can destroy their purpose, muddle their aims, and make them weak; enemies created by the warrior’s path itself together with the sense of indolence, laziness, and self-importance that are integral parts of the daily world.
The mistakes the ancient seers made as a result of indolence, laziness, and self-importance were so enormous and so grave that the new seers had no option but to scorn and reject their own tradition.
The most important thing the new seers needed was practical steps in order to make their assemblage points shift. Since they had none, they began by developing a keen interest in seeing the glow of awareness, and as a result they worked out three sets of techniques that became their cornerstone.
With these three sets, the new seers accomplished a most extraordinary and difficult feat. They succeeded in systematically making the assemblage point shift away from its customary position. The old seers had also accomplished that feat, but by means of capricious, idiosyncratic maneuvers.
What the new seers saw in the glow of awareness resulted in the sequence in which they arranged the old seers’ truths about awareness. This is known as the mastery of awareness. From that, they developed the three sets of techniques. The first is the mastery of stalking , the second is the mastery of intent , and the third is the mastery of dreaming . I taught you these three sets from the very first day we met.
Stalking had very humble and fortuitous origins. It started from an observation the new seers made that when warriors steadily behave in ways not customary for them, the unused emanations inside their cocoons begin to glow. And their assemblage points shift in a mild, harmonious, barely noticeable fashion.
Stimulated by this observation, the new seers began to practice the systematic control of their behavior. They called this practice the art of stalking . The name, although objectionable, is appropriate, because stalking entails a specific kind of behavior with people, behavior that can be categorized as surreptitious.
The new seers, armed with this technique, tackled the known in a sober and fruitful way. By continual practice, they made their assemblage points move steadily.
Stalking is one of the two greatest accomplishments of the new seers. And stalking is merely behavior with people.
You can now understand that shifting the assemblage point was the reason why the new seers placed such a high value on the interaction with petty tyrants. Petty tyrants force seers to use the principles of stalking and, in doing so, help seers to move their assemblage points.
Stalking belongs exclusively to the new seers. They are the only seers who have to deal with people. The old ones were so wrapped up in their sense of power that they didn’t even know that people existed, until people started clobbering them on the head.
The mastery of intent together with the mastery of stalking are the new seers’ two masterpieces, which mark the arrival of the modern-day seers. In their efforts to gain an advantage over their oppressors the new seers pursued every possibility. They knew that their predecessors had accomplished extraordinary feats by manipulating a mysterious and miraculous force, which they could only describe as power. The new seers had very little information about that force, so they were obliged to examine it systematically through seeing . Their efforts were amply rewarded when they discovered that the energy of alignment is that force.
They began by seeing how the glow of awareness increases in size and intensity as the emanations inside the cocoon are aligned with the emanations at large. They used that observation as a springboard, just as they had done with stalking , and went on to develop a complex series of techniques to handle that alignment of emanations.
At first they referred to those techniques as the mastery of alignment. Then they realized that what is involved is much more than alignment; what is involved is the energy that comes out of the alignment of emanations. They called that energy will .
Will became the second basis. The new seers understood it as a blind, impersonal, ceaseless burst of energy that makes us behave in the ways we do. Will accounts for our perception of the world of ordinary affairs, and indirectly, through the force of that perception, it accounts for the placement of the assemblage point in its customary position.
The new seers examined how the perception of the world of everyday life takes place and saw the effects of will . They saw that alignment is ceaselessly renewed in order to imbue perception with continuity. To renew alignment every time with the freshness that it needs to make up a living world, the burst of energy that comes out of those very alignments is automatically rerouted to reinforce some choice alignments.